'If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.' The words are George Bernard Shaw's, but their spirit infuses this memoir by David Profumo, whose father, John, paralysed the government and transfixed the nation through his affair with Christine Keeler in the Sixties. Although he views the actual liaison as a storm in a teacup - everyone else was doing it, after all - Profumo Jr understands why it has such resonance, and faces its consequences head-on: but he uses this chance to highlight other aspects of his parents' lives, for example his mother's glittering career as an actress and the intriguing pre-history of both of their families. The resulting memoir is undeniably personal and idiosyncratic but there is something to interest and arrest on virtually every page.

The Black Hole, by Jan Dalley. Penguin £8.99

For such an iconic event, the Black Hole of Calcutta is also one of the most mysterious: a metaphorical 'black hole' around which all manner of myths have built up. As Jan Dalley shows, we know that a certain number of people were imprisoned overnight in a certain room in 1756 after the city was taken by the forces of the vengeful - and quite probably deranged - Siraj-ud-daulah, but we have no idea who, and little idea why. Therefore, although Dalley advances some convincing hypotheses as to what happened, her main focus is to show where the storming of Calcutta fits into the development of Britain's presence on the subcontinent, and how it marked the tipping point between trade and empire, influence and control. This is both meticulously researched and intensely informative.

The Commonwealth of Thieves, by Tom Keneally. Vintage £8.99

Everyone knows Australia was settled by convicts, but few can imagine what they went through to get there, and how preposterous the idea was of shipping England's detritus across thousands of miles to settle what was not even known to be a new continent (a solution to prison overcrowding that even John Reid might balk at). That the experiment succeeded was due, Keneally persuasively argues, to the dedication and personality of Captain, later Governor, Arthur Phillip, the Royal Navy officer charged with establishing what became the settlement of Sydney. In this extensive, magisterial survey, Keneally, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark, shows how these unwilling settlers created what from the start felt like a distinctly new nation, and how fragile its survival often seemed.

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace Abacus £8.99

David Foster Wallace is one of the new breed of American writers - terribly clever, terribly tricksy, as happy writing about a porn convention as the proper usage of grammar. But this collection of his essays isn't quite as brilliant as it could, or even should, have been. Part of the problem is that, as they're mostly taken from US magazines, they're all so bloody long. But it's also that the self-consciously literary extracts (a speech on the humour of Kafka, for example) can be a hard slog to get through. Foster Wallace is far more readable when exploring the real world - the essays on John McCain's presidential campaign and the adult entertainment industry are both intoxicating - but you often feel he is condescending to, rather than empathising with, the people around him.